Donna Brazile: I Found Proof the DNC Rigged the Primaries for Hillary Clinton

She says that, when she took over the DNC following Debbie Wasserman-Schultz's ouster (for rigging the primaries for Hillary), she promised Bernie Sanders she would look into these allegations and report back if there was any proof of #Collusion between the DNC and HRC.

She says she found it. And this is strange for her to be admitting, given that she attempted to rig the primary for Hillary herself by giving debate questions to Hillary ahead of the debate.

She began to learn about this when she investigated why the DNC was so broke -- she blames Debbie Wasserman-Schultz's negligence as a leader for this.

On the phone Gary told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged.

"No! That can't be true!" I said. "The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers."

...

He described the party as fully under the control of Hillary's campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearinghouse. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party's national committee.

Details of this omitted, but the basic thrust seems to be that Hillary needed the DNC operating just to take in the huge $340,000+ plus donations it was permitted by law to take, but was only giving it just enough money (as an "allowance," Brazille calls it) to remain functioning enough to scoop up that money... for Hillary.

"Wait," I said. "That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You're telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?"

Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

"That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie," he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. "It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election."

...

When we hung up, I was livid. Not at Gary, but at this mess I had inherited. I knew that Debbie had outsourced a lot of the management of the party and had not been the greatest at fundraising. I would not be that kind of chair, even if I was only an interim chair. Did they think I would just be a surrogate for them, get on the road and rouse up the crowds? I was going to manage this party the best I could and try to make it better, even if Brooklyn did not like this. It would be weeks before I would fully understand the financial shenanigans that were keeping the party on life support.

...

Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary's campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild "the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That's what will happen."

Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary's campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as "essentially … money laundering" for the Clinton campaign, Hillary's people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

The agreement--signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias--specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party's finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

I had been wondering why it was that I couldn't write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate's team starts to exercise more control over the party. If the party has an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless because the party already is under the control of the president. When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Al Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.

All emphases added. This is an except from Brazile's upcoming book.

More: Luke Rosniak points out that even though all of the DNC senior staffers would have known about this improper relationship, no one blew the whistle until there was book-deal advance money for the offing.

posted by Ace at 02:48 PM

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